UK Libor trader Hayes given permission to appeal rate-rigging conviction at Supreme Court

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LONDON (Reuters) -Tom Hayes, the first trader jailed worldwide for interest rate rigging, has been given permission to appeal against his conviction at Britain’s Supreme Court, his lawyers said on Thursday.

Hayes, a former star Citigroup and UBS trader, was convicted in 2015 of conspiracy to defraud by manipulating Libor, a benchmark rate once used to price trillions of financial products globally.

He appealed against his conviction earlier this year alongside Carlo Palombo, a former Barclays trader convicted in 2019 of skewing Libor’s euro equivalent, Euribor.

Their cases were referred to the Court of Appeal in London after a landmark U.S. court decision in 2022, in which two former Deutsche Bank traders’ convictions for Libor rigging were overturned.

Hayes and Palombo’s appeals were dismissed in March, with Judge David Bean ruling that both Libor and Euribor “required the submission of what the individual bank ‘could’ borrow, which must mean the cheapest rate available to it”.

Their lawyers say that means Britain is the only country in the world where it is illegal for traders to take account of commercial consideration when submitting Libor or Euribor rates.

The Supreme Court has now given Hayes and Palombo permission to appeal, meaning their battle to clear their names will go the Britain’s highest court.

Hayes said he was “ecstatic”, saying in a statement: “It’s time for the UK legal system to now align with the rest of the world and for these miscarriages of justice to be corrected.”

Palombo said in a statement: “I am delighted and relieved that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear our case and I hope that the wrong that we have both experienced will finally be put right.”

The Serious Fraud Office, which brought the original prosecutions and opposed the appeals earlier this year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Sam Tobin, Editing by Kylie MacLellan)